Here at Isos, we've gotten exceptionally good at working remotely. Long before it was a necessity, we honed our technology, processes, and culture to create a productive workforce. This was due, in some part, to our culture; We have always been proponents of having a flexible schedule and allowing employees to work from home, if desired or necessary. Some people just work better from home, and that's okay. Others must work from home for various reasons...sick children, kids home for summer vacation, the car's in the shop, or the plumber has given you an eight-hour window for when he can fix your overflowing toilet (gross, but this recently happened to a friend of mine. OK, it was me. It happened to me).

Isos also has a geo-distributed workforce. We have employees in San Diego, Los Angeles, Washington, DC, Jacksonville, Atlanta, and Denver, to name just a few. We've been using Zoom since 2016. We have virtual company meetings, employee reviews, standups, scrums, and more. There is pretty much nothing we can't do-and haven't done-virtually before. We even had a virtual happy hour a few weeks ago, and it was tons of fun! But, I digress. As a company, we entered the COVID-19 pandemic with the skills and experience to quickly and easily transition into a purely remote workforce. However, many companies didn't have the same experience. Working remotely can be a clunky experience, for sure...especially if you don't have the right tools and processes in place.

All the same, remote work is likely to become the new normal. In fact, you can read all about our CEO's prediction that remote technical teams are here to stay. In the current climate, there is literally no better time than the present to equip your teams with the tools and solutions they need to set up a productive work environment. This means exceptional visibility into what co-workers are working on, platforms for easy collaboration, and quick turnaround times for tasks and service tickets. That's why we recommend Atlassian's robust toolset. As a Platinum and Enterprise Solution Partner, we're more than a little familiar with it, so we can speak with some authority. So...without further ado (or is it "adieu?" I always wrestle with that one...) here are our top three picks for the best Atlassian tools for remote teams:

Jira Service Desk - Atlassian's ITSM solution is an excellent platform for real-time communication with your customers. You can up your IT Services game tenfold with JSD's incredible functionality for all of the "managements" (i.e., Incident Management, Change Management, Problem Management, Asset Management, etc.). You can also use JSD internally. Literally every team in our company uses Jira Service Desk. Our human resources team manages PTO requests through our "Ninja Desk," our marketing team takes advantage of its functionality for business card, logo, and slide deck requests, and our operations team uses it for new hardware requests and general IT help. It is ideal for reporting issues and delivering exceptional service to both employees and clients.

Confluence - Atlassian may be most famous for Jira, but Confluence is really the Spock to Jira's Captain Kirk. This multi-purpose workspace allows remote workers to stay on the same page (literally). Keep in sync with your teammates, regardless of where you are in the world. You can create content, build out templates for frequently used documents like SOWs, employee offer letters, etc., and organize all your documents into one central place. Plus, you can do collaborative editing on any of these! It is an amazing tool and one we use at Isos all the time.

Trello - Trello is the bomb, pure and simple. Set up one Trello board for yourself, and you'll see why. Trello is basically a much cooler-looking Kanban board and provides an excellent way to visualize workflows and manage projects from start to finish. With Trello, you can collaborate and keep perspective on teamwork with flexible boards, lists, and cards. In the marketing department at Isos, we use Trello for our departmental meetings, our content calendar, our social media schedule, and our own personal to-do lists. We're huge fans. My family even created a Trello board for our European vacation a few years ago.

Whether you're a startup with a team of six people, or an enterprise corporation with 100,000 employees, these tools can help bring clarity and productivity in a time of uncertainty (a.k.a. the COVID-19 pandemic). Speaking of which, if you DO happen to be on a small team or part of a small organization, right now, you can use the Atlassian tools for FREE. That's right! Atlassian is now offering teams of up to 10 users free access to Cloud, along with community support and 2 GB of storage. Read all about it here. We hope you'll check it out! And if you have any questions or just want to talk shop, remember that your friendly neighborhood Atlassian Platinum Solution Partner (Isos) is always here for you!